Posts by wollman@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #Ajx0OHPLLrR8DQRo6S by wollman@mastodon.social
2024-07-15T02:48:23Z
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What's the newest piece of technology that would still basically function if you sent it back in time a century?1924 is recent enough to have reasonably standardized electricity and a wireline telephone network, but not tone dialing (or any dialing at all outside of cities). Radio was booming, but it was all AM (Armstrong hadn't gotten around to FM yet, let alone fancy digital modulation). Early mechanical TV. The principal fuel was coal, with light liquid hydrocarbons for cars and planes.
(DIR) Post #Ajx0OI9mZCaEXSAtUG by wollman@mastodon.social
2024-07-15T02:55:43Z
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I think, surprisingly enough, my answer would be a laptop, assuming you had all your important applications installed locally. You could still plug it in, it doesn't *need* to be on the network (well, maybe your software wants to call home for licensing, but let's assume it doesn't), it doesn't need external displays or pointing devices. Keeping it physically maintained would be the biggest challenge -- and keeping it out of the hands of those who would want to take it apart, irreparably.
(DIR) Post #Ak6CfmFItgUIeaV6jw by wollman@mastodon.social
2024-07-19T20:01:24Z
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@foone Only the ones that are new enough and corporate enough... probably not ones that you care about.
(DIR) Post #AkCJKVsUQHKaR4OfHU by wollman@mastodon.social
2024-07-22T18:49:45Z
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@foone Or just insisting that it can't possibly be what it looks to be.
(DIR) Post #Al0ixW0u445KuM1U6y by wollman@mastodon.social
2024-01-04T00:16:48Z
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@ewen @nic How many eels can you fit in that hovercraft anyway?
(DIR) Post #AlqQAD3Q4V0qxgSJHs by wollman@mastodon.social
2024-09-10T01:08:19Z
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@foone My favorite for the past 40 years has been ADD [BX+SI],AL which I used to see a lot in DEBUG.
(DIR) Post #Alsgqwe0wgWs6PtMw4 by wollman@mastodon.social
2024-09-11T03:11:13Z
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@foone For mobile use in the data center I'd just like a plain-old-VGA monitor with no other inputs... because it's the data center, there are no other outputs.
(DIR) Post #Alx8ihvNMg9HTuiGUy by wollman@mastodon.social
2024-09-13T01:53:33Z
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@apicultor Storage is astonishingly cheap compared to humans (unless you're renting it from Amazon).
(DIR) Post #AlyUFCkeZuxsYHzjYe by wollman@mastodon.social
2024-09-13T22:14:55Z
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@foone Some of them are probably waiting to see what the Federal Reserve does later this month.
(DIR) Post #AmPHV5oS5icDWrw2oS by wollman@mastodon.social
2024-09-26T20:45:49Z
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@foone C:>COPY CON PRN:50 50 moveto/Times-Roman findfont 36 scalefont setfont(Hello, World!) showshowpage^Z
(DIR) Post #AmWKXRAPv39s2O0LtQ by wollman@mastodon.social
2024-09-29T15:25:10Z
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The two most difficult things in life are:* starting things* finishing things
(DIR) Post #AnDI7HeHCcpJWzePqq by wollman@mastodon.social
2024-10-20T23:49:32Z
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@foone Pretty sure there is XMP for that.
(DIR) Post #Apj6xzYe9C5jIbAEsq by wollman@mastodon.social
2025-01-03T22:54:22Z
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@mwl Hmmm....webdns=> select serial from zone; serial ------------ 26906 25975 252888627 2007102006 28697 26886 22213 184 45238 253322835(10 rows)Ok, that fits. The one zone that actually used the data-based scheme (probably because it was imported from a manually maintained zone file) is an empty in-addr.arpa zone that hasn't changed in 17 years.
(DIR) Post #ArzVyqOHLoyWoU4hJw by wollman@mastodon.social
2025-03-12T18:21:56Z
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@b0rk Nope! Unix has always used "character" terminals that contained no local editing logic, just depending on the host to do everything. IBM mainframes and similar systems tended toward "block mode" terminals like the 3270, where the host would transmit an entire form to be filled out remotely, and then when the user pressed "send" it would get transmitted to the host. This was done because interrupts were slow and expensive so you didn't want to take one for every key pressed on the terminal.
(DIR) Post #ArzVysjcdREi5G4lrk by wollman@mastodon.social
2025-03-12T18:38:46Z
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@b0rk I guess it is faster, in a very technical sense involving how the tty driver and line disciplines were implemented that you probably don't want to get into -- since every raw-mode application (like readline) has to context switch back to user mode so the application can read the terminal buffer and interpret the control codes. This is also why there's also a mode where the kernel interprets controls that send signals, but the application does everything else.
(DIR) Post #ArzVyvT4TQmOYnM5z6 by wollman@mastodon.social
2025-03-12T18:23:45Z
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@b0rk (This is what allowed Big Iron like System/370s to handle thousands of simultaneous users, whereas Ken and Dennis were not even trying to do that on their little PDP-7 and PDP-11.)
(DIR) Post #AvuJRXON76yoNoKwzo by wollman@mastodon.social
2025-07-07T23:46:02Z
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@dan So much for "predictable" interface names.
(DIR) Post #AwnIfKPvCmEXsBnKCW by wollman@mastodon.social
2025-08-03T01:17:40Z
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@robinhouston And how many apostrophes?
(DIR) Post #B07iBNsbnDTZp2YGmm by wollman@mastodon.social
2025-11-11T03:31:00Z
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@ricci for real.
(DIR) Post #B2NvmvaaaOHZ91qu6S by wollman@mastodon.social
2026-01-16T21:28:43Z
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@dr_a @munin @JessTheUnstill The idea of the gift economy only works if the labor involved is being paid for by someone else, for their own purposes. That was the kind of milieu RMS was soaking in: everyone's labor was being paid for by the US government, and the software was just an externality of making some other thing (weapons, Ph.D.s, supercomputers, CAD tools, etc.). As a mechanism to foster cooperation toward a shared goal, it's fine. It doesn't generalize to the broader economy.